Works By Chris Gaton

Now that I've lectured you all, maybe it's time for me to be helpful as well. If you are one of the many currently living without the poetry of Chris Gaton, here is an admittedly incomplete list of his major and recent publications.

His books of full collections are:
Am I Too Among The Prophets?
Tannery Row
Gifts From Temuco
Toy Dogs

He has several chapbooks and broadsides, the most recent entitled:
"You Can Find Red Shirts Outside Of Madison, A Farewell To Frank Zeidler."

And his first locally published work in nearly a decade, "Pomes (sic)", was published in the second issue of B Squad Magazine.

His works are very difficult to find in Wisconsin, impossible in Milwaukee. Neither Downtown Books nor Woodland Pattern carry any of his work. I found a copy of Tannery Row at Avol's Books in Madison two years ago. No libraries that I've found have his work in circulation either, so while the hunt may not be easy, it's rewards are well worth it.

A starting place by the water

To better inform the public, since that is the role the internet should take, I've chosen a task that very few people are lucky enough to perform. I will attempt to take a great American poet out of the depths of obscurity and give him the position he deserves. If you don't know Christopher Gaton or his poetry you are hardly alone in the world. But if you live in Milwaukee and aren't aware of heights this voice has achieved then you are in good company.

Gaton is a published poet that readers around the world have come to love. He chose to live in Milwaukee to find the obscurity he felt he needed to obtain his heightened narratives. Here he is a above transcendence. He is in exile, one of his own making. He has lived a life of quiet exhilaration and thunderous serenity and most recently overcame the death of his beloved wife, Bea.

I've studied his writing academically for years. He only took one writing class in college before his wife became pregnant with their first child. He switched majors to something more promising in terms of return. After getting his B.S. in business he went to work for a frozen foods retailer acting as a liaison to Sargentos, a cheese company, appropriate to the man who has breathed new recognition Wisconsin poetry around the world. Not since Horace Gregory has a poet from the Badger state been so revered internationally and not since Niedecker has one been so influential and yet so removed.

The aim of this blog is to familiarize people to this, perhaps, the last poet to escape the macroscope of the internet and still maintain a presence in poetry unequaled since the early Beats.

The back cover of his latest book, Am I Too Among The Prophets?, contains a quote that says it better than I ever could:
"Chris Gaton is Milwaukee's Wallace Stevens. It is criminal how he is completely forgotten in his own home." -Hayden Carruth.